Pipilotti Rist
Eyeball Massage
28 September 2011–8 January 2012
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XZ
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer of video art, acclaimed for her innovative installations. Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage is her first major public survey show in the UK, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, and bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music, and sometimes text to create mesmerising works. Opening 28 September and running until 8 January 2012 the exhibition will transform the gallery’s lower spaces and features new works including an audio-video installation and an outdoor light sculpture.
Rist creates films—playful, psychedelic, sensuous, and often provocative—exploring themes and imagery of birth and death; family and love; the body and the natural world. By exploring size and scale, high and low technology, the natural world and the urban environment, Rist invites her audience to question ways of seeing and experiencing art, and to constantly change their perspectives. The Hayward exhibition presents Rist’s single screen videos and full-bleed large scale projections; monitors in a suspended bathing suit Digesting Impressions (1996); videos projected inside shells and handbags YOGHURT ON SKIN – VELVET ON TV (2009), and onto a chandelier made of underpants Massachusetts Chandelier (2010); onto a model of a suburban house Suburb Brain (1999); and directly onto the lap of a visitor Lap Lamp (2006). Outside the galleries works will be shown in the Hayward Gallery Shop, Enlight My Space (2008); in the Hayward’s café-bar Concrete Eye Pot (2006); and projected onto the floor of one of the gallery toilets, Atmosphere & Instinct (1998). In Nothing (1999), giant iridescent smoked-filled bubbles float down outside the gallery entrance or upwards past Hiplights or Enlighted Hips (2011) a new outdoor light sculpture created from hundreds of pairs of underpants.
Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery said:
“Rist’s works compel us to change our way of looking at our own and other people’s bodies, and question our relationship to nature. Her art transforms the material of our lives into sensual experience and imbues the most ordinary events or objects with a sense of wonder. In her respectful, generous way, she embraces the gallery visitor, and invites them into her world.”
The exhibition is curated by Dr Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery. It will tour to Kunsthalle Mannheim, from 24 March to 24 June 2012.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue conceived in close collaboration with the artist. Essays by Konrad Bitterli, Elizabeth Bronfen, Chrissie Iles, Stefanie Müller and Stephanie Rosenthal, explore the many aspects of Rist’s art, while a visual essay by the artist provides a unique insight into her working methods. ISBN 978-1-85332-295-2.
Also on show at the Hayward Gallery this autumn the exhibition George Condo: Mental States will open in the upper galleries until 8 January 2012. The exhibition is the first major survey of paintings and sculptures from the past twenty-eight years of the artist’s career.
*Image above:
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York (c) the artist
Photo: Linda Nylind.
